Competitive
Advantage through Sustainable Business
Full day seminar given at Dominican
University
Link
to coverage of those events at Dominican University:
www.dominicanuniversity.edu
Summary:
How
do we simultaneously sustain the earth and economics?
It
will probably require that business attaches costs to basic resources and
assets that it presently values as nothing in its cost accounting
analysis. This would require a
significant cultural shift in how businesses presently produce material
goods.
In
recent years some might refer to this as Green Accounting. Under Green Accounting, the depletion of
oil, gas, the destruction of mountain sides for coal extraction, the pollution
of rivers and smogging of air would have assignable costs and would be part of
the product cost equation.
The
question posed in this cultural shift to Green Accounting is: Does a natural resource have a book value
before it is transformed into something saleable?
Paul
Hawken’s books probably addresses that question in many more words. Some of the thought provoking phrases from
his presentation:
Earth
does not come with an operating manual…
Do not adjust the thermostat…
We
can put an electric car on the moon, but not in LA….?
Building
nuclear power plants is like building a house without a bathroom…
Bush’s Energy proposal ((just given a day before this conference) is to extend the industrial revolution…
Our
present system is so wasteful that the solution has become to export jobs to
the undeveloped world…
When
15% of the people feel threatened, people approach a critical mass that can
have them turn the system around…
Eighty
percent of all material things have been created in the last 20 years….
Referring
to housing development models: It’s
like a ponzi scheme. All new houses are
being subsidized by the previous houses.
Natural
strategies for sustainable business success must link equity, economic and the
environment locally, regionally and globally.
We must use future and renewable resources efficiently and effectively.
Promoting sprawl is akin to a business losing its
research and development and manufacturing departments to make profits on a
quarterly basis.
Sustainable
Conservation presentation summary:
Sustainable
Conservation works through collaborative, problem solving partnerships with the
private, public and non-profit sectors to produce environmental solutions that
make business sense.
They
have worked to establish one-stop permitting shopping for farmers wanting to initiate
conservation. An example of their work
was their efforts to help farmers see manure as an energy generator.
Link to their site: www.suscon.org
Quantum
Corporation presentation summary: www.quantum.com
Quantum – the hard driver makers – finds themselves
exceeding government environmental requirements. They are exceeding government compliance requirements because
earlier than most businesses they saw “economic viability” as a key definition
of “sustainability. In other words they saw the waste in their product
development and delivery as a “cost” that detracted from their bottom line
profitability. In 1994-95 they had in-house skirmishes over trying to change the company culture to
one patterned on sustainability. In the
battles they turned to the market for guidance rather than relying on
regulatory requirements. They
negotiated over business deals and by relying on the market have moved their
firm closer to sustainable economics.
Loew’s
Corporation presentation summary:
Loew’s
Corporation owns Home Depot or at least supplies lumber to it. Loew’s was purchasing old growth redwood and
clear cutting in doing so.
Environmental activists designed a negative clear cutting ad that was to
be released. When the activists showed
what they were going to run to Loew’s, the activists said, “If you stop your
clear cutting policies, we won’t run the add.”
Loew’s
changed their policy and the ad wasn’t run.
Tuna
fishing was killing dolphins. A
campaign was waged by teachers and their school children to flood the president
of the Heinz Corporation with sacks of children’s mail and postcards protesting
the dolphin slaughter. It infuriated
Heinz President O’Reilly, and he refused to change fishing policy. Then one of his braver staffers reminded him
that the kids he was offending were his next generation of customers.
The
fishing policy was changed in a week.
Both stories were used as examples of Value Based
Behavior. The actions valued
sustainability and obeying the laws of nature.
Ecological
Asset Management for Emerging Environmental Markets
wcoleman@epri.com www.epri.com
EPRI
believes ecological assets are measurable in real dollars. They use science-based results to educate
regulatory agencies on the benefits of using its science/economic measurements
to value mitigations or trade offs.
They use this approach to produce eco-asset transactions. A proposed Home Depot development was used
as an example.
Home
Depot wanted to build on a large site that might negatively impact the
Red
cockaded woodpecker in Southeast Region (NC).
Consequently, Home Depot found a site a distance from their site where
earlier mitigated land had been used to breed Red cockaded woodpeckers. Those woodpeckers sold for $250,000 per
pair. The Home Depot proponents bought
a pair and some nearby land to mitigate the negative impacts their development
might have on the Red cockaded woodpecker.
Just
think how much a endangered talking Woody the Woodpecker would be worth?